


In August

by Calyps0



Category: The Blacklist (US TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, F/M, Memory Loss, Mental Illness, Red has Issues, Red loves lizzie, What else is new, and that gave me an undeserved sense of entitlement, because i don't know how to write anything else, but please don't jon bokenkamp cause i like your show, canon-typical mentions of violence/guns, coming of age but for senior citizens if that's a thing, did i mention vibes only?, getting old, i just didnt have cable, i watched a lot of old TV growing up ok?, im not actually that old, like - only angst, not sure if you noticed but i live solely to employ the em dash wherever possible, not tagged for major character death but red is dying so...watch out for that i guess, or more accurately memory confusion, red just wants to go home, seriously just vibes, sue me, there's lots of red squiggly lines on this word doc but i'm ignoring those, this fic is vibes only, un-beta'd because i won a spelling bee once in third grade, very little plot whatsoever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:00:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28510812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calyps0/pseuds/Calyps0
Summary: There are precisely two kinds of people: those afraid of what hides in the dark, and those who hide in it.He wonders just what day it was when he made that transition.
Relationships: Elizabeth Keen/Raymond Reddington
Comments: 10
Kudos: 20





	In August

There are precisely _two_ kinds of people: those afraid of what hides in the dark, and those who _hide_ in it.

He wonders just what day it was when he made that transition. It was probably a Tuesday—the most unremarkable of days. Perhaps it was August, a truly unremarkable month. Yes, he’s sure that something was just a bit off, tumbling—like stock market statistics or a story in small caps.

But now— _now_ he doesn’t like being in the dark. Not out of fear, but out of knowing that he’s the scariest thing in it. He’s has become the things his boyhood self had checked under the bed for.

And he knows this in the same way he knows there is nothing remarkable about Tuesdays—that they are _remarkable_ in their un-remarkability. They wait, blank-slates, for someone to transform them into something else. He knows that the same way he knows there are no holidays in August, and there is nothing on this earth that scares him more than the knowledge of what he has become.

\---

She doesn’t fear him, and for that reason alone he wants her desperately. He wants her like he wants poison in his veins—frequently, feverishly, and with so much intensity it startles him.

He feels selfish sometimes, and so devastatingly covetous—not of her but of the _him_ in another life that gets to have her. Because the truth is that he doesn’t want her in this life, greedy thing that he is. This life is already almost over, and has been marked by so much violence he doesn’t know how many days he has left, let alone how much she would have left to give to him. He wants her intensity, her vigor, her _everything_ —full-force. He doesn’t want her weakened and contaminated as she has been by the him he is now. He wouldn’t get to enjoy her the way he so frantically needs to—wholly, purely, right from the very beginning. For an eternity and a half, heedless and exuberant, unblemished and unspoiled, on all the weekends and the vacations and the anniversaries and the times that are filled with _celebration._ An unending, ouroboric feast.

He imagines some reality—a reality, he assures himself, because he does _not_ indulge in fantasy—as something simple, jejune. Absolutely upside-down-sideways in its normalcy, made _other_ by just how devastatingly ordinary it is. An August holiday.

Perhaps a place they might share—a cramped, one-bedroom flat in some apartment in some city within a fifty-mile radius of wherever she happened to grow up. One that does not by several zeroes come close to touching the strata of society he currently inhabits. In his mind’s eye it is furnished modestly with hand-me-down furniture, wholesale interlocking do-it-yourself puzzle flooring, a bathroom mirror scavenged from an alley somewhere because she had liked how the sunlight—streaming guiltlessly through the east-facing windows she’d insisted upon when they moved in—had glinted off its knockoff midcentury-gothic mismatch of a frame. There’s probably hair in the sink. Soap stains in the tub. A couch that has become intimately acquainted with three-and-a-half different upholsterers. The only name brand product will be the coffee, because he knows that her need for caffeine will surely transcend the boundaries of any such imagined universe. There’ll be a landlord with a rather _laissez-faire_ attitude when it comes to peeling linoleum and cracked, paint-flecked baseboards. He imagines memorizing the uneven brushstrokes and the slights swells of three-dimensional drips over the morning paper, armed with a glass of orange juice that comes in a box from the corner mart—purchased alongside a veritable treasure trove of cheap, off-brand, idiosyncratically-American snacks so violently lacking in nutritional value they’re almost jingoistic propaganda, as much as junk food and their superhero mascots can be—and smiling when he remembers painting them with her. She might buy _Donettes_ for breakfast. He might let her. She might stockpile the flat with _Pringles_ and _Ritz_ crackers and microwave imitation meatloaf and buy her shampoo and plastic razors from the dollar store. She won’t have a government job. She could be a cashier in this universe, or a waitress, or a librarian, or one of those people who operate car washes and gesture with a glazed smile and a practiced, unmanicured hand to shift your car into neutral. Something hopelessly, extraordinarily safe. What he would give for her only dangers to be papercuts or spilled coffee or winter chills instead of LCD-countdown bomb-timers or silent rogue bullets. And, _oh_ , how he would worry for her even then, would bundle her up warm as soon as she got home, would inspect every inch of her to assure himself of her well-being. How he would give _anything_ to grow old with her, indulge her as they watched _Wheel of Fortune_ on a beat up cube TV and annoy her by yelling deliberately wrong answers at the visible pixels. How she’d nudge her elbow into his ribs when he’d intone _‘Scylla and Charybdis!’_ on a seven letter clue only for her to chide, giggling, that the category had been _‘Food and Drink.’_

The idea of safe-houses across the globe or twenty-five percent interest rates would be as unreal to them as 1950s cartoon women, petite and pearl-necklaced, whose only problems were years-long hiccupping stints or black-and-white, glinting-eyed, besuited husbands—the brand of women he knows in real life, and who now use decades-old profile photos on golden-years-targeted dating sites. But is it deliberate, or do they simply wake up one day in worn in silk chemises, night cream long gone from the flakey cracks around their mouths and realize twenty years have gone by?

Because that’s how he feels sometimes. Decades lost in the wrong time and the wrong place at the wrong age with the wrong personality and the wrong goals and the wrong—

 _Everything._ Every decision he’s ever made has been _wrong_. Because what’s an empire when that soft, sweet apartment waits for him, when she sleeps in that bed in his imagination and another universe a second and a million lightyears away? There’ll be sheets with a thread count the average preschooler can count to, and a candle that smells like an approximation of what someone very poor might think of someone very rich (it would be wrong, of course, himself having never known anything but the latter.) But he wouldn’t, in this universe, he wouldn’t know any better, and he might always think that lavender smelled just like that because his nose will have never experienced the real thing.

They’d toast New Year’s with liquor store champagne—un-imported, the price tag another thing missing several zeroes.

He’d swallow it down. His taste buds would sing. His heart _longs_ for it.

The only thing that matters to him, the _only_ thing—because he would eat _Donettes_ for breakfast for the rest of his life and toast with domestic champagne and rummage through their logo-bespattered freezer packed Tetris-style with matching TV dinners he winces at imagining peeling the microwave-condensation plastic off of (and that’s enough to make him actually ache at the impact they will leave generations to come) but he doesn’t care, not a _bit_ , he will wear powdered sugar on his lips forever, wait two revolving minutes for dinner _forever_ —is that she is there along with him, together in a life where she is free to love him, and he is free to love her back.

\---

When he realizes his mistake, he almost laughs.

He doesn’t, because he’s dying, and laughing doesn’t seem so manageable anymore. But he wants to laugh, because it is just so _ridiculous_. The reality—still _a_ reality, he maintains to himself—was all wrong. His brain had tried to overcompensate, like usual, and he _had_ imagined a future for them, but it had come out in _reverse_.

Because he can’t imagine by the time she gets that old that _Wheel of Fortune_ will still be airing, or that TV will even _exist_ by then. She has decades ahead of her, at least, but he’d unwittingly frozen her in the past. He’d pictured her in curls and a pinafore dress. The imaginary apartment had had a manual heater. She’d driven a stick-shift car.

His oatmeal had had Karo syrup on it. He’s not sure people even _eat_ oatmeal anymore. The countertop he’d envisioned housed a dot matrix printer, the fireplace had a mantle where they hung up paper greeting cards. The backsplash had been _pastel._

_Oh._

It hits him like a sniper shot. He’d imagined her in his _childhood home._ He’d mentally superimposed her as a little boy does, looking fondly at his mother as he puts on his father’s overlarge shoes and inexpertly-knotted tie and lugs around his big beaten suitcase and plays _pretend._

And he hadn’t noticed, because in this imagining he had looked exactly the same as he does now. Because the three-piece suit was what he had grown up watching—a childhood of TV men who wore dove-gray jackets and belted trousers and puckered hats and fondled beautiful rotary phones and picked up glossy leather suitcases to go to their big important jobs only to come home and learn that their wives had been witches and genies all along.

She _has_ bewitched him, of course, but it’s not quite the same thing. And it’s sad, isn’t it, that the world has moved on but he hasn’t, and inside he is still the boy who worships the men he had grown up idolizing, enough that his sartorial choices are still impacted by those black-and-white afternoons?

(He huffs bitterly, and thanks his foresight, at least, for remembering Darrin Stephens and Captain Tony Nelson instead of the _Lone Ranger._ Chaps are not becoming on him.)

So he’d imagined with her a future he imagined as a boy, because that is what soothes him when nothing else will. But the truth is that even without a death sentence, he would never have gotten it. There are few limits to what his money can buy but this is one of them: wanting a future that lives in the past. (He’s not sure if that makes him feel better about it or worse.) Because perhaps there is one thing scarier than hiding in the dark—one thing that frightens him more than anything else, scarier than death, even—and that is _living._

\---

This mind of his is a strange thing. This is the mind that has tricked him, that has convinced him that his true desires lie frozen in a time that does not exist anymore. This is the mind that plays pretend and dress-up, that remembers his mother’s lacquered nails and hadn’t been able to parse the idea of a wireless printer. This is the mind that is capable of calculating twenty-five percent interest rates but has no patience for how the internet works or for learning the inner workings of the latest iPhone. But why should he care, anyway? Everything he’s ever wanted is stuck firmly in the past. It bothers him, perhaps even more than it should, that every day—every single breath—takes him further away from the start of the decisions that set him on this unstoppable course, and every second is a second further away from him being able to undo the very first thing he ever did.

So instead of undoing, he spends his days building. Building on lies, brick by brick, crisscrossed by untruths that tower above him like great monoliths, homages to the twin spheres of power and money—beautiful corporate ziggurats in the sky. He feels like a foolish child caught by his teacher, forced to cover up one little white lie with another, then another, until he cannot extricate himself from what he has become, and even now he cannot tell the difference between what he believes and what—if anything—was ever true at all. And so he imagines this great structure—this grand building of his empire—and he’s seen how glass is made, with those golden grains from a shore he once stood barefoot on and disrobed, and even as the skyscrapers arise by his own hand like budding flowers he knows they are tenuous, delicate things, because little boys who tell white lies never quite grow out of making sandcastles.

\---

It should be unusual, he thinks, that the older he gets the younger he feels. That when she yells at him he feels scolded, _chastened,_ that when she is kind he feels doted on, reassured. He told her once—when he had only just met her—to stop wearing olive-colored clothing. She had listened, mostly, for some reason he’s still not certain of. But she still has one light green blouse in her wardrobe and every time she wears it he catalogues its reappearance like an alien sighting. The green is a jewel tone, so very close to peridot.

An August birthstone, remarkable and unremarkable. Perhaps she’s trying to tell him something.

\---

Wait, was pastel even a _thing_ when he was growing up? Surely that was a different decade? And were they _Donettes_ or _RingDings_? When did people even start believing in birthstones? He was sure he was one of the first kids on the block to have color TV, but what year did that happen? Now he can’t quite remember. All his years have blurred together, and instead of sorting them out he _indulges_ them by dressing the same as men had decades ago and watching the same _Three Stooges_ reruns over and over until his tinnitus is replaced by an echoing laugh track. 

As far as he can tell, there was a time _before_ and a time _after_ , and sometime in-between there had popped up a multitude of blue-light screens and self-driving cars and cryptocurrencies and talking refrigerators.

(It’s not the screens that bother him, not really, or the automatic cars. The refrigerators do but that’s a problem for a different day.) Besides, one doesn’t amass this kind of wealth ignoring the price of bitcoin, or turning down contractors peddling technologically-advanced military-grade drones. He can’t be a Luddite if he wants to be rich.

No, what really bothers him is that at one point he used to be able to tell what was going to happen, and one day he woke up and discovered he couldn’t. Because his imagination shorts out right at about the introduction of color TV, and it can’t seem to go any further than that. Because something far worse than coming home and not recognizing your wife is coming home and not recognizing anything at all.

\---

So, fine, he feels a bit— _fraying._ Not that he ever assumed this life would come with perfect mental fecundity, and it’s not like he ever thought he was invincible, but it’s just— _disheartening._ He thought he had a little more time. But the reality—ok, fine, he’ll admit it, _fantasy_ —had buffered between decades without him noticing and he ended up here, living in a world that doesn’t know quite where to put him.

The lies don’t help. Keeping track of lies is one thing, and keeping track of the years is another, and dying is yet another, and he can’t do all three things at once. He is so stuck in his lies he feels like going up to people sometimes, not remembering which identity he had used with them last, and simply admitting, _‘I’m sorry, but I seem to have forgotten who I am around you.’_ It might be easier than trying to juggle three bowling pins in one unsteady hand.

Because when he dies—inevitably, and likely sooner than he thinks—he hopes she understands:

The money doesn’t matter. The TV shows don’t matter. The suits don’t matter. August doesn’t matter, Tuesdays don’t matter, suitcases don’t matter, microwaves don’t matter, Astronaut Captain Tony Nelson doesn’t matter. The _only_ thing that matters is sandcastles, and remembering not to build them. Or building them, if you must, but never leaving the beach without ascertaining they’ve been washed away first. Buried, gone, forgotten. Because he’ll be buried, gone, forgotten. Well, he won’t be forgotten, but he will _have_ forgotten. And that is more than most can say.

The dark matters, too, he supposes. But she’s never feared him, anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in like two days and most of it was thought up in the shower. not sure why i thought that was worth mentioning but in case you were wondering, now you know.


End file.
